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Is the Enlightened World View
On Retreat?
By Bert hamminga
(download pdf)
Contents:
Unbeliever Attitude to Religion: Disdain or Anthropology?
Roots of Judasm, Christianity, Islam
Heaven and Hell
Truth, a Revelist Concept
Revelation
and Writing
Arab Enlightenment: Khass and 'Amm
The True, the Real, and the Local
Revelist Remnants in Modern Science
Interparadigm argumentation
Scientific backing of political ideologies
Realism and anti-instrumentalism
Popularization of science
Superstition Given New Opportunities By the Present Big Bang of
Science
Contemporary Science and the Meaning of Theories
Conclusion
References
During the centuries of the European Enlightenment, science was engaged in
liberating more and more research loci from religious obstacles preventing
proper light to shine. Philosophers were continuously engaged in redefining the
borderline between science and religion. To most historians overseeing the
course of these centuries, the process is regarded as the retreat of religious
doctrines from areas amenable to scientific research. Starting from the
mechanical behavior of bodies, science, in the course of the 16th to
the 19th century conquered the areas of light, electricity, gases,
the working of living organisms, finally to reach the human mind, the structure
of social phenomena like trade and political organization. The triumph of
science is one of largely unquestioned background assumptions of philosophy of
science as it has taken shape in the past fifty years.
But, an important hitch has occurred and grew in seriousness. This hitch is the
subject of this paper. In short: scientific and technical development now has
gained a pace that can not even longer be followed by the individual human, and
is now determining every Westerners' life, both in work and private. But the
confrontation with the actual theories and methods underlying the techniques at
work in home and job, even where the job is a scientific or technical one, has
become very limited and fragmentized. The enlightened world view does not
anymore emanate in Western people's personal lives as the evident way of seeing
the world. Some first examples: as a teenager, you are no longer able to repair
your scooter yourself; you go to a garage, where the repairman connects the
vehicle to a computer that he does not understand. This computer tells the
repairman to replace some part, the working and manufacturing of which he is
unacquainted with. The price of the part is appearing on a screen in the
garage office, in a way only known to the garage network operator, who himself
has never been anywhere near a broken engine. The client pays with a credit
card, a process technically understood neither by the customer, nor by the
repairman, nor by anyone else in the garage.
Some other examples: in the high tech office gardens of the mobile phone
companies, youngsters, while working at the next generation mobile phone system,
believe in astrology and aliens. On his way home, the head of this office pops
in a drugstore to buy a homeopathic, infinitely diluted medicine to cure his
little daughters cold. On minarets, the singers are replaced by speakers and
amplifiers, technical children of the civilization of the Western sinners, and
high in space even satellites may broadcast the mosque's message, but down
below, the mikes record talk about how to beat women, the bashful untouched
virgins in heaven and its view down on hell.
Is the world view of modern citizens is getting immune to the general
philosophical thoughts underlying scientific and technical developments in a way
that would be incomprehensible to educated citizens of the 12th
century world centers of civilization and science, Baghdad and Cordoba?
When, in April 1970 the astronauts of Apollo 13 were in great danger after the
explosion of an oxygen tank, the American people, including the astronauts
themselves reverted to praying for their safe return (though astronauts
and ground control took some more effective measures too). In the campaigns of
US politicians, the word "God" occurs in top frequency. Proposals to solve
global health problems involving abortion, if only as an option, are blocked by
the US government on arguments that are religious, hence alien to
scientific analysis of the social processes to be tackled. More generally, the
public morale in many circles, like those opposing a host of different kinds of
research on plants, animals and man and promoting nature conservation and the
life of primitive tribes is based upon the idea of Nature as not being Man's
business (and Punishment will follow if he tries to control!). That is exactly
the key idea fought by Enlightenment from its start. The standard vocabularies
in terms of which these moralism are extensively and repetitively expressed in
mass media have long left the discourse of the sciences of the relevant fields.
After the disaster of September the 11th, it was hard to tell whether
God featured more prominently at the side of the attackers or the attacked
(though it did not seem to solve anything).
This is the problem of this paper: is there a retreat of the Enlightened world
view? That would obviously threaten to turn philosophy of science into a hobby
for a few isolated academics, on equal footing with other, but less isolated
hobbies like UFO search, sound healing, nature conservation, computer hacking,
creationist biology, speed metal pop, etc - if it is not so already, without
many philosophers of science noticing.
Unbeliever Attitude to Religion: Disdain, Anthropology or Both?
Clearly, religious remnants float around in contemporary social
consciousness, science has not eradicated them. The unbeliever (that is the
unbeliever who considers himself enlightened) typically assumes an attitude to
(contemporary) religion and the views on the contemporary world emanating it
that comes close to shrugging one's shoulders.
Hence, the study of the modern and contemporary religions is,
unfortunately, largely left to its believers.
A short look at such believer studies may indeed add to the attitude of disdain
of many contemporary scientists and philosophers. Believer-authors on the
subject of religion are often seen as pseudo scientists whose errors and tricks
are too simple even to analyze, or, if believed to believe in their own proposed
doctrines, to be "backward fellow humans", people whom that treasured growth of
human consciousness which is the fruit of the Enlightenment itself has largely
passed by. Unbeliever scientists and philosophers who do once in a while
try to discuss the foundations of the religious world view with believers often
get frustrated by running after them in verbal circles and finally get into
stalemates of a logical simplicity that no longer allows a serious consideration
of the position of the believer discussion partner.
Though this typical reaction of frustration and loss of interest is quite
understandable, it is actually not suitable to the scientific mind. Scientists
for instance successfully overcame the pitfall of treating the wisdom and
customs of primitive tribes with disdain, as a heap of mistakes of "backward
fellow humans". This marked the birth of a cultural anthropology based on a
clear distinction of the belief of the onlooker and that of the object, and a
clear distinction between learning to understand a belief and starting to
believe it. Once you creep, for the sake of understanding, into another
culture's purported truths they often turn out to form a logic that is, for the
inquisitive mind, interesting to bring out, though this does not entail any
defense of the system as whatever a kind of candidate alternative to whatever
other belief systems. Another way to state my claim therefore, is: not enough
good scientific and philosophical minds are set to the psychological, cultural
anthropological, and other scientific aspects of the religions (and remnants of
religions), their logic and the way they get and keep their hold on the minds of
Homo sapiens well into the contemporary age of space travel and
internet.
In many academic circles it is still fashionable to claim with a laugh that one
"does not understand" believing Christians, Muslims and Jews, as if this is
something praiseworthy. Clearly, the distance between such academics and such
believers has not yet reached the width necessary for the birth of a systematic
cultural anthropology of believers. Which academic would dare to claim with a
laugh not to understand Papua's or San? That would simply mean to put yourself
in the ranks of those in need to read a book or two, hardly something to confess
easily, let alone loudly, let alone with a laugh, let alone in enlightened
academic circles.
Claiming that some academic subject is neglected is, in modern times, with its
unprecedented eruption of literature, a precarious thing to do. I do not to mean
to claim that it would be hard to come up with quite some pages of references to
recent publications on the subject. My claim is that the scientific (that is:
not religious) study of religion should not simply be one of the specialisms in
one of the sub departments of academic intercourse, but, given the baffling
avalanche of recent cultural developments that I specify in this paper and that
are straightforwardly discomforting to the fans of the enlightened world view,
to which I, and, I reckon, most philosophers of science belong, deserves a much
more general attention. That is because religions and remnants and reviving
seeds of them are grossly underestimated key forces in the current revolution -
of unprecedented pace - of cultural consciousness in the contemporary technical
and scientific world.
Roots of Judaism, Christianity, Islam
The dominant religions in the contemporary world are the religions of Semitic
origin. The term "Semitic" has, in politics, been misused in terms like
"anti-Semitism" that are supposed to refer to a hostile attitude towards Jews.
In science "Semitic" is used as a category defined in terms of language
similarities. The spreading of the Semitic languages is an indication of the
spreading through history of the influence of Semitic tribes. Is does not
unambiguously indicate the spreading of those tribes themselves, because the
languages, especially Arab, were adopted by many a tribe subdued during Semitic
conquests, especially the Muslim
conquests 7th and 8th centuries AD (reaching from present day Pakistan to
present day Spain and Portugal (see Map). To the
Semitic language group belong northern African and Middle East languages,
including Egyptian, Berber and Cushitic. The Semitic languages are divided into
four groups: (1) Northern Peripheral, or North-eastern, with only one language,
ancient Acadian; (2) Northern Central, or Northwestern, including the ancient
Canaanite, Amorite, Ugaritic, Phoenician and Punic, and Aramaic languages and
ancient and modern Syriac and Hebrew; (3) Southern Central, including Arabic and
Maltese; and (4) Southern Peripheral, including South Arabic and the languages
of northern Ethiopia. Cushites penetrated as deep down as Uganda. According to
some findings of DNA research, some fairly closed Semite groups calling
themselves Lemba, descending from the Jewish Cohanim priest class would have
migrated even down to Zambia but in the course adopted a Bantu structure of
language.
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob feature as ancestors in the historical
consciousness of most of these tribes, notably in the
Arab and
Jewish tribes. The myths surrounding these ancestral figures indicate an
awareness, at least a conscious claim to common Semitic descent.
Jewish,
Christian and
Islamic
faiths are variants of Semitic religious tradition. The Christian and Islamic
faiths later got adopted world wide by a wide range of peoples with no close
genetic ties to Semitic tribes.
The Northern Peripheral Semitic group, from the Ancient to Middle Stage,
includes Acadian with its dialects of Babylonian and Assyrian, spoken in
Mesopotamia
from about 3200 BC until the Semites were chased out of Mesopotamia by a group
of peoples merging under Hammurabi and ultimately forming part of the great
Persian empire,
the greatest world power and world civilization in the last millennium B.C..
Hammurabi, his followers and successors had driven the Semites out of
Mesopotamia. This at first led them into a nomadic life in the deserts.
Further reduction of the fear of death was achieved by the introduction of
heaven and hell. The first known variant of hell, defined as a torture
department in the underworld, is found among the Greek (Tantalus myth).
Jews never defined heaven - seat of God - as a place where dead people go. After
death all people were thought to linger in a weak form in a dark place somewhere
down. This was not thought to be preceded by some kind of divine verdict
concerning the earthly life of an individual. Such divine jurisdiction, the so
called Last Judgment, was a Christian invention. It was designed to oppose Roman
jurisdiction at the time, thought by religious leaders to be too strong to fight
at its home ground, the real world.
Heaven and hell were taken over by Muslims, but for a different application.
This time it was not to compete with the jurisdiction of an oppressor of Roman
stature. It was primarily designed to convert Arab pagans, primitive desert
dwellers. Muhammad wanted to propose a unified religion including Judaism and
Christianity. In early stages of his efforts Muhammad thought that it would not
be difficult to convert Jews and Christians because he regarded the doctrines of
Judaism and Christianity essentially as part of the doctrine of Islam. After
getting frustrated in his attempts to unite with Jews and Christians, he ordered
the direction of prayer to be turned from Jerusalem to Mecca.
Descriptions of hell in the New Testament and the Koran largely coincide. It
involves fire, thirst, and no or disgusting food -of too high, throat burning
temperature. Heaven is quite an abstract place in the Christian revelation,
possibly due to the fact that articulation of the heavenly desires of Christian
created the danger of bringing them back to the Roman oppressor's ideas of
pleasure. In the Koran, not inhibited by the threat of associations to what
could be called the pleasures of the oppressor, heaven has been concretized all
over the book, containing (in order of frequency) the following features:
rivers, running streams, fountains, abundant fruit, peace, (soft) couches,
bashful virgins, houris (be wedded to), silk, brocade, gold for clothing and
covering, shade (shady trees), (pleasant) mansions, high pavilions, drinks
abundant, no idle talk (no sinful speech), grace in Gods sight, pure nectar, no
toil, descendants accompany, fathers accompany, conversation, questions, young
boys, dishes and cups of precious metal, wine (rivers of), spouses accompany, no
weariness, view down on hell, rivers of milk, no hatred, rivers of clarified
honey, abundant meat, no sinful urges, no disease.
The source and justification of these Judaic, Christian and Muslim religious
ideas are revelations: a human individual (like Moses, Jesus and Muhammad)
claims successfully to have received word by God himself about Universal Truth
and man's assignment on earth. Those human individuals assume the status of
prophets. There is a succession of them, but the typical prophet, while
paying tribute to former prophets, considers himself as the last and definitive
one in the succession. Hence a revelation is to be considered as a final fixing
of Universal Truth to mankind for the rest of eternity by its ruler and creator,
God, through his chosen prophet.
A believer in this kind of prophecy shall be called a revelist, and the
Truth-concept of knowledge shall be called: revelism.
Revelation and Writing
Semitic revelism is literary: Truth is fixated by means of sacred
books, Torah, Bible and Koran, containing the word of God. This considerably
adds to the static character a revelation already has due to the claim to have
received the Definite Word of Universal Truth by the Only God. This deprives its
believers from the prudent degree of sloppiness that oral traditions employ to
adapt to changed circumstances, a strategy advocated by
many wise men including
Plato.
This literal fixation has posed huge problems to the clergy and theologians of
the Judaic, Christian and Islamic religions throughout history. The problem is
that a fixed text, thought to have been revealed at a certain point in time as
an eternal, general, universal Truth, is not designed to cover a process of
historical development. It is frozen by its nature. Since history does not
belong to the kinds of things that can be halted - though leaders of religions
based on such revelations have tried and keep trying to halt historic
developments with the cruelest of means - the problem of authorities in such
religious traditions becomes to determine how the original revealed text relates
to the changing historical circumstances. Should, for instance, an animal
forbidden for consumption in Leviticus, after that species successfully
evolved into immunity for the virus that in 1000 BC made it unsuitable for
consumption, be kept on the list of barred food? Should another animal that
falls prey to a dangerous new mutation of a virus be kept on the list of food
allowed for consumption?
In religions based on Torah, Bible and Koran, a large part of the activities
through history of prudent religious leadership and scholarship consisted of
relating new practice appropriate to new circumstances positively to the
original frozen revelation (sometimes even going as far as disqualifying parts
of the text handed down, as happened in the European Reformation, as
apocryphal). This necessary bending and breaking of text by reinterpreting and
disqualifying parts as smuggled into the texts by thugs naturally leads to
change in the views of "what always had been meant". Humankind must deem itself
deeply lucky for these efforts to read the revelations in a way that harmonizes
with modern ethics, civilization and human rights, but at the same time they
create profound misunderstandings about such religions. The main
misunderstanding, actively promoted, is that the ethics and social structure of
modern revelist communities inspired by these revealed texts are "founded" upon
their textual revelations in a logical sense. Since such revelist
communities form majorities or at least large and politically and culturally
relevant minorities in most regions from the American West coast Eastward to the
Eastbound of Indonesia, the numbers of believers trying to believe and promote
these misunderstandings are vast indeed. The stressful intellectual activity by
believers of continuously updating the "real original meaning" of Holy Scripture
leads away from the reading of the prophetic books in their original historical
status. The chance in danger of being missed as a result, both of the attitude
of insiders continuously reinterpreting the "immutable" texts, and of outsider
disdain towards the claims that these texts are the "foundation" of the relevant
religions in a logical sense is to study Torah, Bible and Koran as magnificent
and truly invaluable sources for the understanding the early history of Semitic
culture, the history from the times of Abraham, around 2000 BC, until the period
in which Muslims were the first to reach the stage of Enlightenment, not much
after 900 AD and culminating in the golden age of Arab science and scholarship
of the 12th Century. For the history of Christian Europe, its meaning is even
stretching some more centuries, until well into the Renaissance period, teaching
us why the spreading of enlightened Arab ideas over the Christian community was
counteracted by extreme oppression and violence (like the brutal and savage
methods of killing of many of the opponents of Thomas Aquinas in Paris academic
discussion, most notably Siger de Brabant, who was later put in the Heaven of
Light in the brilliant company of 12 illustrious souls by Dante, in the
Divine Comedy).
Arab Enlightenment: Khass and 'Amm
In the period of Arab Enlightenment for the first time attempts were made to
define the relation of religious belief to another type of belief thought to be
somehow independent of it, that of scientific knowledge acquisition.
The most explicit attempts handed over to us were those by the Muslim Cordovan
scholar Ibn Rusjd. In Paris, though his name got corrupted there to "Averros",
some put their life in danger by defending his line of argument. One of them was
Siger de Brabant. He finally got stabbed to death by a clergyman Rome had
assigned the task to accompany him everywhere he went. Ibn Rusjd had carefully
molded his argument in Aristotelian terminology, using works lost in Europe,
which, if you read them for the first time after an education, as the European
catholic clergy had, of mostly Bible reading and a little Plato, badly handed
over and intentionally mutilated by second rate catholic clergymen, astonishes
by its logical precision. The most worrying aspect of Ibn Rusjd's work was
that he conceded that scientific knowledge (the result of the exercise of
reason) can be, and often is, inconsistent with the literal text of the Koran.
In such cases, Ibn Rusjd wrote, the Koran should be interpreted
metaphorically. Since common people ('amm) due to their weak
mental capacities, neither understand the exercise of reason not the idea of a
metaphor, they should not bother about it and take the Koran literally
everywhere. The problems of reason and metaphor are technical issues for
specialists (elite, khass).
Ibn Rusjd's approach was meant to create loci for scientists to explore the real
world freed from the time consuming obligation to logically connect their
findings to the literal text of the Koran. It marks the stage of Arab
enlightenment.
It took quite some casualties in the European Christian world,
but three centuries later similar points of view gained a beginning of
acceptance there too. Moreover, due to the rise of the general level of
education, khass gained, and 'amm declined in social
importance in the western world, which finally led to the dechristianization
process of the last century. Meanwhile, the Arab world was overrun, first
by the Mongols and then by the Turks, who, after a first lapsing into savagery
inspired by primitive versions of Islam, quickly (that is, in little more than a
century) took over the enlightened Arab view on the relation of science and
religion. This led to general technical superiority of the Muslim Turks over the
Christian Europeans, also with respect to military hardware. This enabled the
Turkish Empire to conquer Byzantium in 1453 and ultimately led to a prolonged
military stand-off ending only in 1683 before the gates of Vienna. Most of the
so called European technical inventions of this period, ranging from heavy duty
precision cannons to croissants and cappuccino, actually found their way from
the Muslim world to Europe in this historical development.
The True, the Real, and the Local
The marked difference between the religions of Semitic origin and most other
religions in the world is the claim of Universality, and corresponding zeal to
convert mankind to its principles. There is only one place where I found
something carrying a remote similarity: the pastoralist Karamojong tribe in
North Eastern Uganda believe they were given all cows in the world and hence can
take any cow they see anywhere because it must have been stolen from them.
The Jews did not yet have such a far reaching claim of Universal Truth. And they
never adopted it. There is, in Jewish revelation, only one God, Jahwe, that is,
only one God for the Jews. But, for instance in the Torah, the
Moabites, a tribe unlucky enough to inhabit the promised land before the rivers
became, as we read, red of their blood and the promised was taken, had another
God, and lost the war, according to the Torah, because their God was weaker than
Jahwe. That is not a matter of uniqueness and generality, but of quality, which
is quite a different issue. In defending their stance in situations of conflict
and despair relating to problems with non-Jews, Jews are not accustomed to refer
to God, as for instance Americans and Arabs do. Americans and Arabs, especially
in political contexts, seem to think they are only convincing if they suggest
that God is behind them. This behavior can be traced back to Jesus, who
unambiguously made the transition to a claim of general, Universal Truth. There
are no others. This was taken over by Muhammad: "There is only one God and his
prophet is Muhammad".
Claims of revealed Eternal Universal Truth are hot potatoes. Its defenders are
vulnerable to questions on observations made and other practical issues that
seem to put the revealed doctrine into question. But, even worse, they are
serious obstacles in practical negotiation under conflict and disagreement.
Seeking compromise between two inconsistent Universal Truths is formally
impossible, and if prudence nevertheless requires it, any such compromise should
- by both parties! - be venerated as being wholly in harmony with their own
Universal Truth. This is either impossible or leads to very complicated
unperspicuous pieces of argumentation beneath which monsters keep active ready
to raise their ugly heads. Well known utterly curious dogmatic compromises on
historical meetings of revelist top clerics can testify, but a good example is
also the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. At first sight this could seem
an inappropriate example indeed: the Holy Scriptures abound with places where
God and prophets encourage or even command the flock to commit human rights
violations. But what underlies the Declaration is the (vain) revelist hope of
universality, and so is its revelist practical use as a weapon against a
political enemy.
In short, claims of Universal Truth in practice have a disintegrating effect.
This can properly be dubbed the inverse dialectics of universality
aspirations.
In the early stage of analytic philosophy, philosophers introduced the axiom
that claims of universal truth are a hallmark of science. From a logical point
of view, the universal quantifier was widely thought to be the first sign in any
formula representing a scientific theory of law. This view is still widespread
among philosophers of science, especially in the traditions in which works of
for instance, Popper and Nagel are recognized as significant sources.
In history, however, science progressed by local hypotheses, not by Universal
Truth. It did not progress by replacing the integrated general body of human
belief by another one, not even by trying to maximize its claim of as large an
area of application as possible. Such a maximization strategy, blowing the
balloon up as far as possible, is a type of revolution that reminds more of the
birth of a new religion at the moment of a new revelation. On the contrary, in
the course of Enlightenment, science wrestled its way out from under religion in
a piecemeal way by establishing more and more local knowledge. That obviously
was the wisest way to keep out of trouble with zealots. But by the same token,
these claims of local, but independent area's of knowledge acquisition by the
early scientists were what mostly worried the Pope. Galilei did not get into
trouble by his dealing with the structure of the solar system, which after all,
even today, as is well known by contemporary popes, and can safely be assumed to
have been anticipated by 16th century ones, is uninteresting, unknown or at
least unclear even to most contemporary voters, consumers and certainly most
regular church visitors in Western countries. The trouble was caused by Galilei
introducing local claims to knowledge not based on revelation. Galilei
may or may not correctly have been thought to have refuted the claim of
universal Truth of Christianity, but what he put forward was much scarier than
just another claim to universal Truth: he came up with a little bit of local
knowledge that is, claims just resting on some partial interpretation of just a
few things that one can only observe by using specialized equipment.
Osiander, in his preface to Copernicus tries to explain that truth is a
religious thing, not a scientific one: "He who takes as the truth what is
devised for another goal will come out of this science with greater ignorance
than the one he entered with." (Copernicus (1883)) His words have turned out to
be more scaring and unacceptable to Christian revelists than the actual results
of the sciences: this new intellectual enterprise called science, claiming to
produce valuable thoughts outside the realm of truth, made them unsure,
with good reason, about how it could affect religious authority. As science
progressed, its particular results have at many more occasions caused fear to
revelists - think of the idea of evolution -, but nothing compares to the fear
caused by Osiander-type explanations that the very notion of truth has
nothing to do with science. This not only shook revelists. It aroused
philosophers of science and induced them to attack such "instrumentalist"
positions, and to defend "realism" against such scandalous scientific paganism.
Nietzsche, as he realized, was far too early in claiming that the desire for
truth is a Christian residue: "To laugh about yourself, as you should in order
to laugh yourself out of the whole [idea of] truth..." (Nietzsche, Die
frhliche Wissenschaft (undated) p.42, book 1, section 1) and his
characterization of truth as the "weakest form of knowledge" (ibid.
p.152, Book 3, section 110). Now, in the 21st Century, more of us
have enough experience with scientific and technological progress to start
understanding what Nietzsche tried to say.
Of course, claiming that science is about local knowledge does not mean to deny
that in science, the establishment of more and more local knowledge led to
attempts to integrate dispersed local knowledge suspected to be interrelated.
Many of those integration projects turned out to be based on daring but useless
assumptions and had to be abandoned. A few, and those are the famous ones, like
the Copernicus-Kepler-Galilei-Newton-Einstein development, resulted in
integrated structures that held modified forms of the initial local integration
candidates, according to the logical relation that has been called dialectical
correspondence (Nowak, L and I. Nowakowa (2000), p.185-8). But of course also
the latest structure in any hitherto successful sequence will, just like the
previous ones, not last for long in the future. Theories, as Osiander,
Nietzsche and that part of the modern philosophers working along instrumentalist
or idealizationalist lines express themselves: are no truths.
The best way to rid yourself of the idea of science as truth finding in the
context of modern science is to study the method of idealization and
concretization (Nowak, L and I. Nowakowa (2000)). The idea is that scientific
laws typically hold only under ideal conditions. Such conditions typically are
never met and could never be met in the real world. In that sense such ideal
conditions could be called "false", but that notion of falsehood is a kind of
category mistake if applied to ideal conditions. Ideal conditions are not
meant to be "true". Nevertheless, for revelists, truthists, realists,
anti-instrumentalists and universalists it may be good as a first approach to
think of laws as "false in the real world" and "only true in an ideal world". It
helps you to get rid of the romantic idea of science as the Quest for the Hidden
Truth of the Universe. Stating that scientific laws are true in an ideal world,
however is in itself a tautology: by - logical - definition, for every
consistent statement there always are ideal worlds in which it is true.
If this "falsity of laws" claim would have been the message of idealizational
philosophy, the harvest would have been as small as Tarski's definition of truth
("p" is true if and only if p) if taken as the message instead of the medium
(Tarski (1956), p.152-278 ). The revelist notion leads to a modal logic: "p" is
a universal Truth, "p" is a universal Falsity, or "p" is neither. The first two
options are interesting to the Enlightened mind only in logic and mathematics -
and authority there is argument, no prophets or church leaders. It is a
relatively small field. The Enlightened mind shades the enormous "neither" class
in a subtle multitude of colors, always remaining ready to slightly shift color
at any time. This is what has been reconstructed as the approximation
strategy in the method of idealization and concretization.
The idealization/concretization approach to scientific theories is meant to deal
with this "neither universally True nor universally False" class and to replace
their Truth with approximation. Approximation is a relation between a
theory, a set of mathematical functions or a computational model, and the data
sets the scientist works with at a particular time. Approximation is crunching
numbers with functions (and crunching functions with numbers). Both math and
data sets are continuously changing in reaction to the results of approximation
calculations. Fantasy, and readiness to shift, in the light of
approximation problems, from one fantasy to another is important in science but
truth plays no role. Whoever, philosopher of science, propagandist or
(would be) scientist, puts a rude metaphysics of "Truth", "Reality" and
"Universality" below the subtle and fluent development of modern scientific
theories as an immovable or definitive "foundation" of science is a hypocrite or
a fool: one day later, his "truth" has faded in the versatile minds of whatever
scientists he took it from and he belongs to the past.
Revelist Remnants in Modern Science
Though historically the process of Enlightenment is the triumph of science over revelism, science has been hampered by revelist remnants and sometimes even had its revelist revivals. The reader may have the inclination to see this section as dealing not with science but with "pseudo-science". Such a distinction has, however, proven to be so treacherous and ideology dependent that I will not make it at all. Science is being understood here in a no nonsense way as what is done, said and written by those generally regarded as scientists by their society.
Interparadigm argumentation.
The claim that scientific theories are not Truths is even in modern day
science not an uncontroversial one. It can be seen contested, or at least
overlooked, in the rhetoric of scientists' debates as soon as beliefs are
dogmatically expressed, especially beliefs in the deep theories underlying whole
branches of science, such as relativity theory, thermodynamics, the theory of
evolution and the theory of free market competition. In debates among scientists
about the rival fundamental principles dubbed "incommensurable" by Kuhn,
scientists have been shown not to be shy to defend revolutionary new points of
view by reverting to the truthist and realist conversion strategies that remind
of revelists. The subject we touch upon here is the "politics" of science in
times of deep controversy and scientific "schism". Because rival viewpoints are
largely backed by what their pay off will be in solving the agenda of future
applications ("puzzles", as Kuhn called then), rival "political" leaders
in science are in need of followers willing to have faith in the promise. Since
research funds are scarce and the flock is constrained in size, to attract a
sufficient number of research workers for a new approach is a territorial matter
in which propaganda may be directed to what wins funders and followers over
rather than to what private doubts scientific leaders may have about their own
approach.
An illuminating example is that of Avogadro refusing Gay-Lussac the right to
round off 1.97/1 to 2 in the volume analysis of oxygin-hydrogin reactions, while
after having found 1/4.75 for the weight ratio of N and H in NH he wrote
"because an integer remains easier in memory, we prefer the ratio 1:5 until a
more precise ratio hads been obtained" (Hooykaas, R. (1976), p.230).
Nice also are the "bandwagon effects": after scientists of authority have
measured the value of a natural constant, there is a tendency of values close to
it to be reported until another scientist of authority reports a significantly
deviant value. This then marks the building up of a new "bandwagon".
Such social phenomena in science exist, despite the fact that science and
Universal Truthism root in fundamentally different metaphysics. The message of
Enlightened tolerance is to find local solutions for local problems.
"Mechanics", for instance, is a local solution. It is of little help in
explaining most known phenomena. Those who have proclaimed mechanics as a
universal solution, like materialists, lost their energy in revelist
philosophies that did neither contribute to the growth of successful scientific
applications of mechanics nor to the growth of any other field of scientific
knowledge. The enthusiasm of such proponents of grossly universalist claims is
at least quite similar to the phenomenon of lapsing back into revelist
fundamentalism. As Thomas Kuhn noted, even once most of the leading research
workers in a field feel that an old basic theory has been convincingly surpassed
by a new rival, typically a gradually ageing group of die-hards will remain,
defending it against the odds. At such occasions, Truth takes its toll. Such
lapses no doubt have been seen most frequently - and seen up to totalitarian
proportions - in universities and academic institutions. The paradox
of the university world is that it depicts itself as the carrier of scientific
progress, but in practice acts as the maintainer of scientific traditions, which
is by nature a conservative task. Universities typically formalize a hierarchy
in faculties and departments and thus impose requirements of discipline on those
who should, according to the Enlightened world view, be independent minds. Thus
it is at least far from certain that universities are the institutions from
which to expect the largest of contributions to the growth of knowledge. And
indeed a surprisingly large amount of great minds of the Enlightenment lived in
filthy garages, on dusty attics and in the wilderness. Such minds typically are
either much poorer than university professors and not bothering about it, or
much richer. No wonder totalitarian societies cherish their universities as
useful instruments to counter Enlightened tendencies. Their very
structures makes them suitable indeed for that purpose.
Scientific backing of
political ideologies. This brings us to a second reason that some may
be doubting the claim that science is not about Truth, let alone universal
Truth. In many social and political situations, scientists, especially those
with state or party university backgrounds are found backing political
ideologies such as racism, nationalism, socialism, and communism. In their
messianistic rhetoric they are typically drawing predecessor scientists into
their camp, not infrequently putting them in roles reminding of that of the
revelists' prophets.
Since such kinds of scientific developments in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union
have been covered extensively by its intellectual and political enemies, let us
start with a 20th Century English example, the Eoanthropus
dawsoni.
In a series of discoveries in 191012, Charles Dawson, an English lawyer and
amateur geologist, found what appeared to be the fossilized fragments of a
cranium, a jawbone, and other specimens in a gravel formation at Barkham Manor,
on Piltdown Common near Lewes in Sussex. Dawson brought the specimens to Arthur
Smith Woodward, keeper of the British Museum's paleontology department, who
announced the find at a meeting of the Geological Society of London on Dec. 18,
1912. Woodward claimed that the fossils represented a previously unknown species
of extinct hominid (Eoanthropus dawsoni) that could be the missing
evolutionary link between apes and early humans. His claims were endorsed by
some prominent English scientists. The primacy of Great Britain in the world was
established by research in what is the True Foundation of Mankind: the earth's
crust, Sussex. The display of Eoanthropus dawsoni was opened by Her
Majesty the Queen.
A later examination of the Piltdown remains showed them to be the skillfully
disguised fragments of a quite modern human cranium (about 600 years old), the
jaw and teeth of an orangutan, and the teeth probably of a chimpanzee, all
fraudulently introduced into the shallow gravels. Chemical tests revealed that
the fragments had been deliberately stained, some with chromium and others with
acid iron sulphate solution (neither chromium nor sulphate occurs in the
locality) and that, although the associated remains were of genuine extinct
animals, they were not of British provenance. The teeth, too, had been subjected
to artificial abrasion to simulate the human mode of flat wear (Source:
Encyclopaedia Britannica).
Research with similar aspirations abounds in Russia, China, the Holy Land and
elsewhere. Governements have usually some interest in monitoring the results of
home archeology and it is well known that many countries discourage the advent
of foreign archeologists.
Let us go to France. In 1952 Swedish dentist Sten Forshufvud read the recently
published account of Napoleon's death by Merchand (Sten Forshufvud, (1995)).
Based on his knowledge of toxicology, Forshufvud came to the conclusion that
Napoleon had been murdered. Fortunately, a number of Napoleon's staff had kept
locks of the Emperor's hair, which were passed down the generations, sometimes
coming up for auction. In the 1960s this happened and in order to prove this
theory Forshufvud turned to Glasgow University forensic scientist Professor
Hamilton Smith, who had developed the nuclear techniques to record very small
levels of arsenic. Since it has been established that hair grows at
approximately one inch every two months, if it is shaved at the scalp and the
date is known, then tests for arsenic in the hair can determine almost to the
day when arsenic was ingested. Using these techniques it was shown that small
quantities of arsenic were present in Napoleon's hair. It was possible to poison
a person without detection by slowly exposing him/her to small quantities of
arsenic. This technique was known and was described in a book that Albine de
Montholon had with her in St Helena. Forshufvud concluded that Napoleon had been
murdered by the Comte de Montholon. This obviously had implications for the
correct view on this episode of English and French political history. To
investigate further details, Forshufvud went on search for more specimens of
Napoleon's hair. The French Academic network, however, had made sure that no
further of the known specimens would be made available to Forshufvuds research,
a French academic attempt to keep French history French. (It failed. British
scholars later found that the British wallpaper of Napoleon's room at St. Helena
contained some arsenic too, though - but the lobby behind this last addition has
yet to be identified - not in lethal quantities).
These are all fine examples, but the revelist remnant of revealing the hidden
Truth in history, and fixating it in a Book has become the best known by the
work of Karl Marx and the status that this work acquired in socialist and
communist doctrines.
Marx was well aware of the structural analogy of his view on history and that of
the Bible, from the paradise of Genesis to John's Apocalypse. Moreover, he gave
his followers, in the form of Capital, their own Book. Lenin adapted
the doctrine to make it fit the Orthodox Christian flavor of early 20th
Century Slavic culture by molding it more emphatically into the eschatological
sequence of Paradise (Original Communism)- Fall (Original Appropriation,
Feudalism, Capitalism) - Satan-in-Chains (Dictatorship of the Proletariat) -
Heaven (Final stage of Communism).
In communist thinking, ideology covers all science in the same way as religion
was stipulated to cover all science in the European Middle Ages. The Enlightened
idea of science as objective research work done by independent minds is, in
communist thought, rejected as a bourgeois mystification of the Truth of the
scientific suppression of the proletariat under capitalism.
Marxism was by far not the last scientific current backing political doctrines.
In the second half of the 20th Century, the Last Judgment regained
popularity: politics first saw scientists supporting the limited resources
movement (Club of Rome, Meadows (1972)). After resources turned out not to be
the most acute problem, the Western world saw the rise of the ozone layer/global
warming movement, supported by an extensive scientific lobby. After a brief
interruption by fear for a temperature jump inversion to an ice age quickly
followed by the sudden fear of the possible collision of the earth with a
meteorite, the attention of public opinion was turned back to the main world
diseases, like AIDS, malaria, diabetes, obesity etc, all of them attributed the
status of the globally most serious disease in the world, at least by the mass
media, at least each of them in turn around the time of the annual world
congresses of their respective medical research communities.
So far for contemporary scientific backing of ideologies.
Realism and anti-instrumentalism in the philosophy of science. Philosophers of science, often posing as "realists", contest the claim that scientific theories are no Truths. They often label this view as "instrumentalism": the idea that theories have no ontological claims in themselves but just hold together an integrated body of relations observed to hold approximately in the area's covered by those who "work with" that theory. Philosophers of science infuriated by instrumentalism are not seldomly warning against it as a cultural danger. Their "realism", the doctrine that good scientific theories are true in the real world (under a Mediaeval plethora of rival definitions of what is "truth" and what is "reality"), is claimed to save the world from the "instrumentalist" danger.
Popularization of science in mass media. The revelist mistaken image of the scientist as a hero searcher and finder of hidden Truth is actively enforced by the popularization of science, for instance in the TV broadcasts of Discovery and of National Geographic Channel. There, the attention of the TV audience is turned emphatically from the nasty math to the face of the scientific prophet-Truth finder who, in an adventurous quest full of despair, finally uncovers the definitive Truth. Big media successes typically report on scientific research proving truth of claims occurring in ancient revealed texts, such as finding traces of habitation of the Black Sea floor and ruptures in the Bosporus area indicating a Noah type of flooding of the Black Sea basin due to global warming around 5000 BC. This mass media behaviour suggests that Ibn Rusjd was not far off the mark with his Khass-'Amm distinction.
Concluding: unfortunately it cannot be denied that scientific research every now and then degenerates into a Truth finding mission. Revelist approach to knowledge seems to keep an appeal allowing it to deformate the image of science and even to creep in scientific procedures.
Superstition Given New Opportunities By the Present Big Bang of Science
Despite liability to infection by revelist remnants, the contemporary growth
of scientific knowledge is explosive. In the seventeenth century it had become
impossible to acquire all available scientific knowledge in such a way as to be
able to actively participate professionally in all fields. Nowadays, no one can
be expected to keep updating the overview of even only the main results of the
main fields of physics and biology. There is no evidence of any kind of decline
of the acceleration of the growth of knowledge.
Within scientific fields, finding and keeping track of related fields, the
results of which are relevant to one's own, is now constituting a major problem.
No one can be sure not to have lost track of others whose results should have
been monitored. Theories may start to diverge not due to conscious disagreement
but simply due to lack of mutual acquaintance of the research groups working
with them. The astonishing explosion of knowledge, the process crucial to the
future, is uncoordinated, autonomous. Nobody is in charge. It just
happens, and nobody it going to stop it. Every individual involved only sees
(let alone controls!) a negligible fraction of it.
Despite this historical process of loss of individual grip on history, the "We"'s
and "Mankind"'s broadcasted by priests, networks and politicians have
become more and more encompassing, and by now long has reached the stage that "We"
have to save the earth (for some danger or another, by some means or another). "We"
have responsibilities, tasks and missions. "We" discuss genetic
research and nuclear proliferation as if "We" could exert any influence
on its development. Everybody, scientists included, is ready to back up claims
on the issues "We" have to address. "Mankind" is the standard
subject to enter the ecoliturgy at the end of nature documentaries: "Whether
this unique species will survive, depends on whether Mankind....".
The belief in "We" and "Mankind" as a collective subject is no
doubt the chief item of contemporary superstition. It is found everywhere, until
deep in the labs of the Nobel Prize winners. And it is this "Mankind"
for whom the prophets wrote their revelations down. As far as Darwinist
biologists and sociologists are concerned, it does not exist.
But this is only the very summit of all opportunities that the Big Bang of
science provides to superstition. Once science became an autonomous social
process, Enlightenment became a feature of social structure: anyone who has any
talent that is of any use to any fraction of science has a good chance to be
absorbed in the process of scientific growth, be it in a lab, be it by on line
partnerships between people working at common interests, be it in a company
designed new types of products for industry or consumer. Whatever beliefs you
have apart from this one talent that may suck you in the scientific social
structure, is irrelevant. If you can deal well with UTMS communication software
you will be hired, no matter whether you believe in aliens, are a pro-life
pro-death penalty Methodist, or even a post-modern deconstructivist. Who cares?
Enlightenment has become independent and autonomous nowadays and only tends to
occupy a very small part of the human soul, the rest of it is free!
The situation today is, of course, only one particular stage in a historical
development of, it seems, ever increasing speed.
At the beginning of the Enlightenment, the revelist idea of Truth prevailed: the
idea that knowledge is Truth based on holy books and that (religious)
authorities are in charge of interpretation problems. Such authorities do
discuss controversies but, due to discipline of khass and illiteracy of
'amm (to stick to the terms of Ibn Rusjd) only their common conclusions
tend to reach the general public.
Then, in the 16th, 17th and especially the 18th
Century an intermediate stage was reached where the public still generally
considered thought to be a specialism exerted by khass , but different
and inconsistent khass-opinions started to spread wider among the
general public (the spread of literacy, the introduction of newspapers, later
the widening of democratic rights) and started to be discussed there. The
general public was getting accustomed to the existence of divergence of opinions
and discussion.
At the contemporary stage, philosophers and scientist do not differ from any
other social group like rock musicians, sporters, film stars, artists,
filmproducers, TV documentary makers, web editors. Everybody develops his own
thoughts fitting to his own life, and there is simply little time and little
interest to study thoughts of those who lead other professional lives. The only
ones who need to keep track of the development of thoughts other than those of
their own group are those who work for politicians or for the selling
departments of producers of mass consumption goods. Hence the observable
features of their work (advertisements, political campaigns) are the only ones
that are put to the test of general public approval (in terms of
earnings and votes). These reflect the continuous multi-billion dollar research
aimed at improving the operating system of societies, at least of the part that
forms targeted consumers and voters, albeit a system that merely aims at having
their members buy some product or cast their votes some way rather than another.
The data of advertisement and public relation offices are the only wider ranging
generalizations available. The contents of advertisements and political
campaigns makes clear that this is not what many of us would like to think of as
the main achievement of western civilization.
Be this as it may, the contemporary fruit of the Enlightenment is that there is
no social danger anymore in top soccer players wearing crosses from their necks
(as long as they use the stretch strings given to them by the scientifically
versed training staff), believing they should never step on the line when
entering the field, rock stars believing in aliens, web editors believing in God
and captains of industry cured from cancer by miracles. Frequency and depth of
such beliefs are continuously monitored by the market research workers of
politicians and mass producers, and as soon as they become socially significant,
they enter the advertising and political campaigns. Scientific knowledge is an
"objective" power, but it is not to be located in the consciousness of the
public. As advertisements show, the public is not interested in the theories
underlying cell phones, but in for instance, their helpfulness in getting into
contact with someone desired to become a sexual partner. The public is not
anymore interested in economic theories underlying political programs but in
whom of the professional cheaters contending for some seats deserves their
"trust". Science is everywhere: no mass product, no political program can be
successful without science, but it has become autonomous, unconscious,
objective, collective, a force by itself.
This process of Enlightenment becoming independent and autonomous is not to be
identified with the Ibn Rusjd's khass/'amm distinction.
Whoever worked with the youngsters actually doing the developing work at the
front edge of technology knows that in their office-gardens top soccer players
believing they should never step on the line when entering the field, rock stars
believing in aliens, and web editors believing in God are quite at home. Ibn
Rusjd would probably conclude that today khass has disappeared because
science did not need it anymore.
The general image emerging is that science and technology now got so fragmented
that the single individuals' knowledge of it has become too small to allow for a
rational world view that reflects the state of available knowledge. The single
individual, even if he is thoroughly schooled in some scientific or technical
specialism lapses for the unoverseeable part of nature he is not specialized in,
into the world view radiated by TV channels, rock star albums, Popes, Imams,
government press offices, deodorant advertisers or other public "authorities" at
hand.
It is as soon as they are seen as research objects, not to be argued against
(for such arguments are easy to give and already satisfactorily supplied for
many centuries) that the subject shifts to the peak of relevance to the
humanities. Clearly the questions are:
Contemporary Science and the Contemporary Meaning of Theories
Not wishing now to enter the skirmish between rival views in the philosophy of science we stick to the basics: roughly, scientists communicate and update with three things: data sets, functions and theories
A striking thing of the explosively growing speed of scientific developments
in the last decades is that the life cycle duration of this third element,
theories - between adoption and dumping - has shortened enormously, even at
a pace similar to that of consumer durables. In the 19th Century,
adoption and dumping of theories still were big and emotional happenings, both
to an individual scientist and to a research group. Nowadays, proposing to
replace an old theory with a new one is a routine thing at every lab's
colloquium session. Like consumer durables, modern scientific theories have
become lighter. They should just contain enough to visualize the processes
studied in a way nicely symbolizing the math currently applied. Theories are not
the big issue anymore. A theory is OK if it helps you thinking through the math
you apply and how it does well in some and badly in other applications (think of
the speed in which new proposals for new types of subatomic particles and new
types of energy are succeeding each other in contemporary pure physics). The
important thing for a scientific research worker is to be tolerant to may be
even strange ideas that might come up in yourself and your colleagues. Though
this seems where enlightenment has naturally taken us, at the same time it means
that what formerly may have fiercely been fought as "superstition" is not such a
big deal either - provided you keep doing the math and keep checking and
worrying where and how data fit it nicely and where they do so unsatisfactorily.
To contemporary scientists, theories are fun things to play with and no big deal
to dump. In this respect, research workers are well integrated in the culture of
homeopathy, astrology, fundamentalist fire arm lobby Christians, pro life pro
death penalty Presbyterians, child pornography, nature conservation,
anti-globalization, Catholic pedophilia, Muslim fundamentalism, Gay rights
activism, aliens, worm architecture, UFO's, anti-immigration politics, ozone
layer defense, plane hijacking, animal rights, slavery reparation payments, post
modern deconstructivism and everything else nowadays tried out in the mass
media, on the internet and elsewhere. Modern scientists are product of a culture
allowing you to deal as liberally, freely and smoothly with your ideas as
toddlers do. After all, it is by now well established that as far as the speed
of growth of knowledge is concerned, toddlers are superior by far to adults. It
is no accident that nowadays adults acknowledge and admire this, while even
fifty years ago, to adults toddlers were not more than inferior animals that
could only hope to become human by eating and obeying. This is the trend in
modern western society and this trend is unstoppable.
True Enlightenment frees man of the burden to treat his theories as universal
Truths. The astonishing explosion of light ideas and theories floating around in
the worlds is not a token of the end of Enlightenment. It shows how playfulness
makes scientists, artists and others astonishingly effective once they are
unhampered by "Truth".
Enlightenment has become the obvious practice and thus disappearing from
conscious considerations. Hence, as a conscious world view it lost its
necessity. It it turned into the fabric our social structure as happened with
the free market economy, which, quite similarly started as an idea. Similarly,
few are able to consciously ponder the differences between a market economy and
a hunter-gatherer economy.
The larger and most powerful part of civilization ceased to take matter of
"Truth" as its daily object of thoughts and doubts. Its hands are free to create
an unprecedented explosion of knowledge, technology and power. We have reached
the stage where the gods, heavens and hells featuring in private homes, TV
shows, computer games and holy places - apart from some escapes from the closet
in the form of youngsters trying their computer shooting game at school or
practicing the Koran maxims in aero plane raids - can do no more harm to
civilization and the progress of knowledge than their competitors: aliens, stand
up comedians, soaps, advertisements and political campaigns.
Conclusion
Revelism got free of its roots and is now fully accepted among
Enlightenment's freely floating debris of theories.
